Every lovely pair of female pins that beat a merry clip through town seem to be offset by a pair of safari style khaki half-kecks housing a maggoty pair of white -sometimes hairy, sometimes not -spindly horrors rooted in battered Jesus boots or sockless, smelly, sweaty trainees.

There are ritual baths, churching, shaving heads, denying abortion and contraception, arranged marriage, purdah, barring unclean women access to the altar let alone the priesthood, letting men divorce but not women--all this perverted abhorrence of half the human race lies at the maggoty heart of religion, the defining creed in all the holy of holies" (Toynbee, 2001, p.

The difference may have to do with all the marvelously poetic allusions lambs evoke, by contrast with maggoty animal heads, which evoke none and are, in the idiom of contemporary childhood, simply gross.

I'll let Dahl explain, way better than I can: "If you looked closer still (hold your noses ladies and gentlemen), if you peered deep into the moustachy bristles sticking over his upper lip, you would probably see much larger objects that had escaped the wipe of his hand, things that had been there for months and months, like a piece of maggoty green cheese or a mouldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.

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